


Sunsets From Memory

by Filomena



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Artist!Tsukishima, Existential Angst, Existentialism, M/M, Painting, Writing, writer!yamaguchi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26115685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filomena/pseuds/Filomena
Summary: “Why don't you paint from memory?” Yamaguchi asks, after a while of looking at Tsukishima’s palette.Tsukishima flips out the paint brush from between his fingers. He presses it into the mess of blue and grey. “Because there’s nothing in my memory to paint,” he answers simply, poising his brush in front of the gessoed canvas.Yamaguchi turns his body to face Tsukishima. “Nothing?”“Nothing.”Yamaguchi is a writer who needs a place to work. Tsukishima is an artist who begrudgingly offers him his room.
Relationships: Tsukishima Kei/Yamaguchi Tadashi
Comments: 15
Kudos: 69
Collections: TsukkiYama Week 2020





	Sunsets From Memory

**Author's Note:**

> slight tw: a few mentions that life has no meaning.

“Can I borrow your room to write in?” Yamaguchi asks, immediately after he throws the door open.

A blonde man looks up from a blank canvas. His mouth curls in irritation.

“Can’t you find another room?” he asks, yanking his brush away from his canvas. A spot of black lands on his wrist.

Yamaguchi’s eyes go from the black spot to his annoyed, disgruntled face.

“I only need a place to sit.” He points at a desk and chair shoved in the corner, and the soggy weight of his jacket makes his arm bow.

“Why?”

Yamaguchi adjusts the strap of his bag. “To write,” he says, hoping to god that the papers in his bag aren’t wet.

The blonde man gives Yamaguchi a once over. His eyes are a lamp yellow, reflecting back the incandescent light around them.

He nods curtly. “Only if you’ll be silent.” 

Yamaguchi’s shoulders drop. He hucks his bag off, and several drops of water splatter onto the ground. “Of course,” he says, and he could cry from relief.

* * *

The blonde man doesn’t talk to Yamaguchi, nor does he usually acknowledge his presence. He simply sits on his uncomfortable looking, rickety stool, and paints.

He paints sunsets. He paints nature scenes Yamaguchi’s never seen. Sometimes, he paints people, but that only happens rarely.

“Where is that?” Yamaguchi pipes up one day, looking up from his manuscript. He has barely any words written on it. 

The blonde man is painting rolling, tumbling grass hills. A partially finished cow is on the edge of the canvas. A farmhouse sits in the middle of it, grass bending and curling underneath it.

“What do you mean?” asks the blonde man. His brow furrows as he fixes a cloud.

Yamaguchi runs his finger along his empty page. “Do you draw from memory?” he asks, trying again. 

The blonde man goes back to his palette.

“Of course not,” he responds, as if the answer is the simplest thing in the world. “Why would I do that?”

* * *

“I only write from memory.” Yamaguchi stares at his empty page. There’s an inkblot on the edge of it, and he has the urge to rip it out.

The blonde man’s brush pauses over the tree he’s painting. 

“Alright,” he says, sounding dismissive. He flicks his wrist a certain way, and suddenly, the painting of the tree looks like an actual tree.

Yamaguchi shifts in his uncomfortable chair. “You said you didn’t paint from memory, right?” he continues, despite the prickly aura the blonde man is giving off. 

“I did.” The blonde man adds a bird to his tree.

“I just...” Yamaguchi struggles to find the right words. He stares at his barren page. “I just think that’s interesting.”

The blonde man shrugs. “I don’t think it’s interesting,” he states simply, giving the bird a companion.

Yamaguchi looks up. “Why not?” 

“It’s a matter of preference.” The blonde man shapes out the bird’s feathers. “So I don’t think it’s particularly interesting.” 

Yamaguchi rests his pen on his bottom lip.

“What’s your name?” he asks, after a while of being lost in his thoughts.

The blonde man’s face looks discontent. “Why do you want to know?” he asks carefully. He sounds preoccupied, and as a result, annoyed at the intrusion.

“Curiosity.” Yamaguchi sets his pen down, feeling resigned. “My name’s Yamaguchi Tadashi. What’s yours?”

A look of perplexion goes over the blonde man, and then he says, “Tsukishima Kei.”

* * *

“You say you write,” Tsukishima drawls one day, applying gesso onto his canvas with a large brush, “but I haven’t heard you write anything.”

Yamaguchi watches the ink bloom under his unused pen. He thinks about his empty apartment, and his even emptier notebook. “It comes when it wants to.”

Tsukishima smoothes out the edges of his canvas. “So it never comes?”

That sounds about right. Yamaguchi has been staring at empty pages for months.

“It still comes,” he insists, finally releasing his pen from the paper. He’s stained through at least four pages. 

Tsukishima drops his large brush somewhere beside him. He grabs a smaller, finer brush, and starts to pick out tubes of paint. 

“If you say so,” he responds, after placing the brush between his middle and index finger, and prying open the tubes with both his hands. He dabs blobs of colour onto his palette. 

Yamaguchi watches Tsukishima mix together the colours. Today, his palette consists of dark blues and slate greys. 

“Why don't you paint from memory?” Yamaguchi asks, after a while of looking at Tsukishima’s palette. 

Tsukishima flips out the paint brush from between his fingers. He presses it into the mess of blue and grey. “Because there’s nothing in my memory to paint,” he answers simply, poising his brush in front of the gessoed canvas. 

Yamaguchi turns his body to face Tsukishima. “Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve never seen a sunset?” Yamaguchi pries, watching the broad expanse of Tsukishima’s back. He has excellent posture, much unlike Yamaguchi, who always hunches over his desk. 

A line appears between Tsukishima’s eyebrows. “Of course I’ve seen a sunset,” he answers, sounding slightly snide. A mottled, blue-grey colour shows up on the canvas. “Who hasn’t?”

“But you don’t want to paint those?” Yamaguchi presses. His pen drops onto his desk with a __clack.__

He’s only ever written about the sunsets he’s seen. Imagining one, he figures, wouldn’t be as authentic. 

“No.” Tsukishima turns the paint mark into a long, horizontal line. 

“Why not?” Yamaguchi asks, and immediately retracts himself. He focuses his gaze onto the empty page of his notebook. He’s gone too far.

Tsukishima shrugs. The line coming out of his brush doesn’t skitter at all. “Because they’re not worth painting.” He adds more paint underneath the line, turning the bottom half of the canvas a leaden-blue. 

“Which is what I said earlier,” he continues, going back to his palette. He adds a sheen of purple into the mess of grey and blue, making it look like contused flesh.

 _ _Why aren’t they worth painting?__ Yamaguchi wants to ask, but presses his lips together. 

“I don’t know how you do it,” he replies instead. He picks up his pen again, even though he knows he won’t write anything. 

Tsukishima’s back stiffens, but his hand remains fluid in its motions.

“Do what?” he asks, tone neutral. 

Yamaguchi watches him apply black to the centre. The more he paints, the more the canvas looks like a gaping maw.

“Imagine things,” he answers, eyes tracing the way Tsukishima drags his brush over the canvas. 

Tsukishima snorts. “You don’t imagine things?” He pauses to mix more colours on his palette. He stops when he reaches a sickly plum shade. “Aren’t you supposed to be a writer?”

Yamaguchi reminisces on the last time he thought he was a writer. It seems like ages ago. He doesn’t like to think about it.

“Supposedly,” he non-answers, and his pen dips in his hand. It feels like a leaden weight. The metal barrel digs into his finger annoyingly.

The canvas looks like nothing and everything. He sees different things in the paint. Bruised flesh, bedsheets, spilled wine. The centre of an eye.

He leans his head closer to the direction of the canvas.

“What’s that supposed to be?” he asks, tilting his head. A sudden thought strikes him - something he read in the newspapers the other day. The discovery of the centre of the universe. Apparently everyone revolves around a black hole, or something. 

He waits for Tsukishima to respond, and when he doesn’t, he asks, “The centre of the universe?” 

“What?” Tsukishima asks, sounding disdainfully shocked. There’s purple mixed in with grey and blue and black, and Yamaguchi’s head spins when he looks at it for too long.

“Read about it in the paper,” Yamaguchi mutters, eyes fixed on the grotesque painting.

Tsukishima scoffs. “It’s a lake,” he answers, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Yamaguchi stares at the canvas. __A lake?__ It doesn’t even resemble water. It looks like some kind of infestation took over the gesso, tainting it from the inside out.

 _ _What kind of lakes have you been to?__ He wants to ask.

Tsukishima draws a black, wizened stem that curls around the whole blob.

 _ _Oh.__ The thought dawns upon Yamaguchi, so obvious and overt. __He’s imagining it all.__

* * *

“What do you write about?” Tsukishima asks, sounding just the right amount of detached. He muses over a shade he can’t seem to perfect.

Yamaguchi stares at Tsukishima’s back. 

“Life,” he answers, tapping his pen on his desk. “Stuff you would encounter in life.” 

“Like what?”

Yamaguchi frowns slightly at the question. “I dunno,” he says, flipping his pen back and forth. A dull thudding fills the silence his hesitancy leaves. “Suffering. Growing.” 

He feels self conscious at the words. They almost seem cheesy. 

__But that’s what life is about,__ he mentally protests, halting the slew of embarrassment coming from his mind.

“Suffering?” Tsukishima asks. “Are you one of those people who thinks that life is suffering?” 

He squeezes in some white from a tube. The discontent look on his face seems to grow bigger. 

“No.” The thudding of Yamaguchi’s pen grows louder. Hitting his notebook is oddly satisfying, and the impact is getting rid of his built up stress. “I’m not.”

“But you said suffering,” Tsukishima says, mouth curling into a frown. The more he mixes in the white, the more frustrated he looks.

“And growing,” Yamaguchi corrects. He has to raise his voice slightly, since the sound of his pen is steadily becoming louder. “Life is more of growing, to be honest.”

Tsukishima’s shoulders sag. Yamaguchi can’t tell whether it’s in disappointment or agreement. 

“Growing, huh?” Tsukishima notes rather scathingly, and Yamaguchi confirms that it’s disappointment.

He watches Tsukishima unscrew the cap of his black paint. 

“What do you think life is?” he asks, his pen thwacking into the pages of his notebook. A slight crease is starting to form on the pages.

Tsukishima rips the cap off of his black paint. A smear of it covers his entire thumb, and he shakes it uselessly, scowling.

“Nothing,” he snaps, and the thwacking of Yamaguchi’s pen immediately stops. “Life has no meaning.”

“...None?” Yamaguchi asks, in slight disbelief.

“None,” Tsukishima confirms, finding a cloth to wipe his thumb on. When he can’t find anything, he wipes it on the inside of his sleeve’s cuff.

Yamaguchi watches his composure splinter. “You’re going to get your wrist dirty,” he says, watching the way Tsukishima’s wrist starts to tinge black already. He has pale skin, and the black spots stick out like a sore thumb.

“I know.” Tsukishima shakes his sleeve off, smearing more paint onto his wrist. He pointedly ignores looking at his hand. When he goes back to his palette, he huffs irritably, and turns the whole shade into a motley, moss green. 

He dips his largest brush in it. Paint globs on its bristles, looking wholly undesirable.

The canvas makes a __thwack__ sound as he slaps the brush on it. He drags the paint side to side, back and forth, in no particular order.

Yamaguchi watches the brush’s bristles bend and flex.

He takes his pen back into his hand, and as if propelled by some imaginary force, begins to write.

* * *

“It was Nietzsche,” Yamaguchi says, looking up from his long, unfinished sentence, “who said that all life is suffering.”

Tsukishima shows no signs that he heard Yamaguchi.

“I, uh,” Yamaguchi continues, watching Tsukishima calmly paint a sun. He doesn’t know why he’s talking. Why would Tsukishima care about something as trivial as Nietzsche?

“Apparently,” he soldiers on, cursing his awkwardness, “life is pointless without suffering.”

Tsukishima’s brush pauses over his canvas. “That’s dumb.” 

Yamaguchi sees a sliver of Tsukishima’s face from the position he’s sitting in. “Why?” he asks, sounding surprised. 

“Who said life was anything?” Tsukishima says, already sounding resigned.

The detachment in his voice makes Yamaguchi’s eyebrows raise. 

“I mean,” Yamaguchi begins, a slew of rebuttals on his lips, but Tsukishima interrupts him. 

“I don’t care.” Tsukishima prods his brush into his palette. “Talking about this is a waste of time.”

Yamaguchi frowns. “Why’s it a waste of time?” he asks, indignance beginning to rise in his voice.

A streak of paint makes its way onto the canvas. “Living isn’t that much,” Tsukishima parries easily. He’s drawing the outlines of some skeletal figure. “Why should we bother complicating it?”

“What do you mean,” Yamaguchi says, “living isn’t ‘that much’?” His mind swims in the background, unable to come up with a proper response.

Tsukishima shrugs. His shoulders poke through the loose confines of his dress shirt. “Breathing,” he replies tonelessly, dotting his brush into another colour on his palette. “Eating. Talking.” 

His lip curls. “Coexisting. Isn’t that what life is all about?”

Yamaguchi gapes at his unbothered, unbristled posture. “You think life is just that?”

“Well,” Tsukishima responds, raising an eyebrow, “I just said that, didn’t I?”

Forcing his mouth shut, Yamaguchi looks back at his empty page.

“What a miserable existence,” he finally responds, eyes flicking between his incomplete page and Tsukishima’s nondescript, indecipherable painting. 

Tsukishima laughs. It’s bitter, and something about it makes Yamaguchi’s chest twinge.

“Isn’t it?” Tsukishima confirms, dipping his brush back into his palette, this time for a shade of grey. 

* * *

Yamaguchi lets his pen clatter on his desk. The lines on his page are blurring together, as are the half-baked words he’s written.

Incomplete sentences. Mismatched paragraphs, trailing phrases. It’s all worthless.

Tsukishima paints a smooth line across his canvas. From the looks of it, he’s drawing a sunset.

“Writing troubles?” he asks carelessly. His face is expressionless. His tone is emotionless. He draws his sunset robotically, as if he’s done it millions of times.

Yamaguchi watches him paint. “You could say that,” he answers, the words caustic on his tongue.

Tsukishima dots a cloud on the corner of his canvas. His fingers manipulate the brush easily. No bumps, no smears, no evidence of hesitation. 

In this particular moment, Yamaguchi decides that he dislikes him. 

“That’s a shame.” Tsukishima goes back into his palette, combining together several shades. He gets an orange dot on his fingertip.

The sunset is going quite well. For something that doesn’t exist, Tsukishima manages to paint it as if it does. As if it has meaning to him, as if he’s seen it before. As if the sunset motivated him to paint in the first place. 

“How do you fake it so well?” Yamaguchi asks, crossing out a series of scribbles on his page.

Tsukishima looks unperturbed. “Fake what?” he responds, fleshing out a cloud. 

Yamaguchi glances at the painting. 

“What you paint.”

Shrugging, Tsukishima goes back into his palette with his brush. “Years of experience,” he replies simply.

Some type of irritation rises in Yamaguchi. It causes the grip on his pen to become uncomfortably tight, and he wills his joints to loosen up. 

“So you’ve been living a lie, then?” he asks, sounding almost challenging. 

“Not living a lie,” Tsukishima primly corrects, his face an aggravatingly calm, “but living.”

He shakes his head slightly. “Why are you asking these things?” he questions, and an accusing tone breaks through his calm facade. 

Yamaguchi’s manuscript lies in front of him. “Inspiration.”

“But it makes no sense.” Tsukishima traces out a yellow sun. “The questions you’re asking, I mean.”

Yamaguchi lets the bottom of his pen rest on the desk. “Because I’m looking for inspiration,” he answers.

Tsukishima laughs. It’s dry and short, and it cuts through the stagnant air in their room. “You’re looking in the wrong place.” 

He fills the outline of the sun with egg yolk yellow.

“Anything is inspiration if you try hard enough,” Yamaguchi mumbles, noticing the way incandescent light casts a yellow sheen over Tsukishima. The creases in Tsukishima’s white dress shirt look sunken in and grey.

Like a moon, maybe. If Yamaguchi let himself be bromide about it. 

“Then you must be desperate, hm?” Tsukishima says, pulling the yellow of the sun outwards, turning it into a burst egg yolk.

Yamaguchi tilts his head, staring at the sun. “You haven’t seen a sun like that before?”

He doesn’t think he’s seen a sun like that. It’s too luminous. Too yellow.

“Of course not.” Tsukishima raises an eyebrow. “I told you, I don’t-”

“Paint from memory, yeah,” Yamaguchi effortlessly completes.

Tsukishima continues to paint, slightly deterred by the interruption.

“What is it, then?” he asks, a defensiveness breaking through his voice.

Yamaguchi blinks. “What?” 

The sun melts into the lake below the horizon. It spills into each crease of water it touches.

“Suffering or growing.” Tsukishima blends pink into the yellow sky. “You ask me questions for inspiration. You take inspiration from life, which you say is suffering and growing.” 

He turns his head away from the painting. His eyes glint in the flickering, warm lighting. 

“So which one am I?” he asks, head tilting, brush poised in his fingers delicately. “Suffering or growing?”

His eyes are like the streetlamps Yamaguchi passes by at night. Or like the moon, the kind you only see rarely, which hangs behind numerous dusky clouds.

“Both,” Yamaguchi answers. Tsukishima tightens his grip on his brush. “You’re suffering now, but growth always follows suffering.”

Something Tsukishima’s expression softens. Then it hardens, closing itself off to further scrutiny. 

“What are you,” he drawls out, turning back to face his painting, “a new age prophet?”

Yamaguchi feels something in his chest shutter off. 

“Not even close.”

* * *

“Why do you even paint?” Yamaguchi asks. He taps his pen on his paper. Antsy energy fills him to his core.

Tsukishima sighs. It's a wonder that he hasn’t kicked Yamaguchi out yet. “Because I’m bored,” he answers. “Because I have nothing else to do.” 

Yamaguchi drops his pen, accepting his defeat. “I don’t understand you,” he finally admits out loud. He’s been trying to make sense of Tsukishima these past few weeks, but has come up with nothing.

“Why do you write?” Tsukishima asks. His arm is lax as he outlines a circle with black paint. 

A good question, technically. Yamaguchi wouldn’t have hesitated to answer it several months ago.

Now, however, he dreads answering it. 

“Because…” he tries to respond, tapping his pen on his paper again. It lands on the sheets with a dull __thunk.__

“Because you’re bored?” Tsukishima finishes.

Yamaguchi shakes his head. “No.” 

“Because you have time to kill?” 

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

Yamaguchi presses his pen into his paper. The pressure in his hand grounds him, forcing his thoughts into one direction.

“I write something I like,” he begins to say, continuing to push his pen into the paper. “And then I feel proud of it.” His pen starts to skew. “So I continue to write.” 

“Huh.” Tsukishima turns the circle into an oval. “That’s a simple goal.” His voice sounds almost critical.

Yamaguchi’s pen careens off the page, causing an ugly squeaking sound to ring out.

“You don’t approve of simple goals?” he asks, picking up his pen before it rolls off the desk. 

“As long as it’s a goal,” Tsukishima responds loftily, “it doesn’t matter.”

Yamaguchi places his pen beside his pages, perfectly lining them up to each other.

“But what do __you__ think?” he pries. Tsukishima’s indifference annoys him. Part of him wants to make him furious, just to see how he would react. 

“What do I think?” Tsukishima repeats, enunciating the words in a patronizing way. “I just told you-”

“What do you really think?” Yamaguchi interrupts. He makes sure not to touch his pen. 

Tsukishima pauses in painting his oval. 

“Simple goals are dumb.” His voice is curt, and Yamaguchi winces slightly. “What kind of motivation is that?”

Frowning, Yamaguchi knocks his pen slightly askew. “What more do you need?” he accuses. 

“Talent.” Tsukishima begins to draw his oval again. “You need luck, too.”

He dips back into his palette for a shade of indigo. “If you can’t make it worth something,” he explains, voice level, as if he’s said this many times before, “then what’s the point?”

“Isn’t it already worth something to you, though?” 

“No.”

Yamaguchi feels his face scrunch up in disbelief. “Then why are you painting?” 

“I don’t know,” Tsukishima suddenly snaps. He turns his circle into something jagged. “I can’t stop. It’s a habit.”

“Because you enjoy it, right?” Yamaguchi asks. His pen is now overlapping his paper. So much for neatness. 

“No.” Tsukishima has a strange frown clouding his face. “I don’t.”

Yamaguchi pushes his pen off of his paper. “Then why are you doing it?” he demands, and his voice leaks some of his frustration.

Tsukishima’s lip twitches. “Is enjoyment the only reason you should do things?”

Yamaguchi looks at him in awe.

“...Are you stupid?” he asks. “Of course you should do things because you enjoy them. Why else would you do them?”

“Oh, really?” Tsukishima counters, sounding bitter. “Riddle me this, then,” he says, filling his circle with pitch black. “Do you enjoy your job?”

Blinking, Yamaguchi says, “Not particularly.” 

“Do you enjoy driving to work every morning?” Tsukishima asks, each of his words pointed.

“No.” Yamaguchi hates driving, but that isn’t the point. “Why are you-”

“Then why do you do them?” Tsukishima interrupts. His eyes are narrowed on his canvas. “Going to work, driving. If you don’t enjoy them, why are you doing them?”

Yamaguchi feels resignation settle into his bones. “Because those don’t count,” he defends. “Passions do. And the things you do in your spare time.”

“But that’s not what you said earlier,” Tsukishima corrects. 

“I didn’t mean __everything,__ Tsukishima.” 

“So you’re a hypocrite, then?” Tsukishima says, ignoring Yamaguchi’s statement.

Yamaguchi scowls. “You know what I mean.” 

He looks at Tsukishima, who is stretching the outlines of his oval outwards, forcing them to touch the edges of the canvas.

“If you don’t enjoy painting, why are you wasting your time on it?”

“Because it’s a habit,” Tsukishima snaps. “I told you that already. You’re repeating yourself.” 

“But…” Yamaguchi trails off, watching Tsukishima fill the empty spots of his painting with indigo. “You have to enjoy it. At least a little.” 

“I don’t.” Tsukishima runs his brush dry, and dips it back into his palette. “I don’t have simple goals like you.”

Yamaguchi gives up, morosely pushing his pen to the side. “What do you have, then?”

He sighs. The argument is running his head into circles.

“Don’t answer that,” he says, cutting off Tsukishima’s bated reply. 

Tsukishima is an enigma who wants to stay that way. Yamaguchi has run out of patience. 

* * *

Lines swim in front of Yamaguchi’s eyes. They’re empty, of course. Devoid of words to fill them with.

The desk he’s using is uncomfortable and rickety, just like everything in this room. His shirt presses into the skin on his arms, undoubtedly leaving a crosshatched impression, and his back hurts from being hunched for so long. 

“You haven’t written anything.” Tsukishima is drawing another forest. At least, it looks like he’s drawing a forest.

 _ _He’ll turn around and say it’s a swimming pool,__ Yamaguchi thinks wryly. 

“You know,” Tsukishima says, over the din of Yamaguchi’s mind, “there’s no reason for you to be here if you won’t write.” 

Yamaguchi clicks his pen shut. “That’s true.”

The desk shakes under his palms. He steadies it, only to make it shift more. 

Tsukishima sighs through his nose. “I’m not allowed to keep other people in here.”

Yamaguchi looks up in surprise. He thought this room was open to the public. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that he doesn’t know anything about Tsukishima. 

“Sorry,” he apologizes, applying slight pressure to the end of his pen. “I didn’t know that.”

 _ _Why are you letting me stay here?__ He wants to ask. But he doesn’t. Tsukishima, if he’s ever inclined, will tell him.

“...What are you having trouble with?” Tsukishima asks, and sounds like he’s forcing the words out. 

Yamaguchi stares down at his empty page. He has no inspiration at the moment. Nothing in his life arises any notable emotion - not the sunsets he’s seen recently, the people he’s seen on the street, or the cafe windows he’s looked into. 

“It’s not something you can help with.” He stops applying pressure to his pen. Any more, and it’ll click open again. 

A dissatisfied __hmph__ rings out. “Alright,” Tsukishima answers, sounding almost haughty. “If you say so.” 

Yamaguchi can hear how offended he is. 

“I just-” he reasons, scrabbling to right his wrongs, “it’s not something anyone can help with.”

Tsukishima raises an eyebrow.

“There’s nothing…” Yamaguchi continues, adding onto his ramshackle sentences. He shakes his head. “I write from memory, right? There’s nothing in my memory to write about.”

“Why are you writing from memory, then?” 

The question takes Yamaguchi off guard.

“Because I don’t know how else to write,” he answers. He hopes his desperation isn’t leaking into his voice.

“You’ve never tried?” Tsukishima asks, sounding unbothered. There’s a furrow between his brows.

Yamaguchi drops his pen beside his notebook. “Never.” 

“Hm.” Tsukishima adds black to his sea of conifer green. “Maybe you should.” 

“But how?”

There’s the dry sound of a brush against gessoed canvas.

“Sit and think,” Tsukishima simply answers.

Sit and think. Yamaguchi doesn’t sit and think. He walks and looks, searching the outside world for anything of worth. He combs regular life dry. He analyzes every sunset he sees.

“I don’t sit and think.” He places his pen into the crease of his notebook. “I don’t...I don’t know.” 

“You can do other things while thinking, you know,” Tsukishima responds dryly. “You don’t have to sit.”

The corner of his mouth lifts up. A smirk, Yamaguchi dazedly realizes. 

“If that were the case, I’d be worried for you.”

“You’d be worried for me, huh?” Yamaguchi replies, the edge of his own mouth rising. The action feels strange. He hasn’t done it in a while.

“I’d wonder how you’ve survived so long.” Tsukishima adds blue into the centre of his green mess. It’s probably not a forest. 

Yamaguchi shuts his notebook, letting his pen get crammed into the middle of it.

Is it possible to imagine while observing? He wonders this as he shoves his items into his bag, hauling it over his shoulder. 

“By never sitting,” he answers, getting out of his chair. He pushes the rickety thing into its equally rickety desk. 

Tsukishima turns his head from his canvas. A questioning look comes over his face. “Where are you going?” he asks, brush still poised to paint, a blob of colour still on its tip. 

“I’ll give thinking a try.” Yamaguchi lets his finger glide over the jagged edges of the desk.

“You will?” Tsukishima asks. He lets his brush hit the canvas, not caring where it lands. 

Yamaguchi makes his way to the old, weathered door. 

“Not like I have any other choice,” he answers, mouth curling into the loosest definition of a grin. His hand twists the doorknob.

Tsukishima stares at him, expression unmoving.

 _ _Figures,__ Yamaguchi thinks, his unfilled pages seeming light in his bag. 

“Try painting stuff from memory,” he says offhandedly, knowing that Tsukishima will probably never follow his advice.

An idea strikes him. “Try painting a sunset.”

Tsukishima nods his head slowly, which surprises Yamaguchi.

“Only if you imagine one,” he says. 

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was hard to write, dear god. hope you all liked it. i think it's very reminiscent of how i wrote 2-4 years ago(which is probably why it was hard to write). 
> 
> i'd like to think that these two meet again. maybe something will bloom between them. either way, it'll take a long time for them to grow with each other. 
> 
> anyways. [here's my twitter](https://twitter.com/burningutica) and [here's my tumblr](https://phyllomena.tumblr.com/) if you want to hmu. have a great day/night.
> 
> (this fic was inspired the johnlock fic "colourblind" by queen_mycroft on wattpad. it definitely wasn't her whole story, just the basis of its beginning: a writer finds an artist working in a room, and asks if they can work there. i didn't adopt literally any other plot points, because i did not want to plagiarize in any shape or form.)


End file.
